Surprised to see many people liked Bill McCreary. As an Oilers fan, I always thought he was the worst. I vaguely remember numerous botched calls, missed goals, invented penalties... McCreary remains the only ref I saw completely destroy an entire game and hand a win to the club that deserved to lose. I've never been able to remember exactly what game it was -- it was, like, an otherwise forgettable Edmonton @ Hartford game in 1988 or something -- but he invented a bunch of Edmonton penalties out of thin air, missed an obvious Glenn Anderson goal that clearly went over the line, called a Hartford goal in that didn't go in, called about 8 penalties in a row in the third to Edmonton, etc., etc. I think the Whalers were confused at the end of the game when they'd won.
It was such a different referee-era back in the 1970s to 1990s. Refs were alone out there, dealing with 18,000 pissed fans and two pissed coaches every night, while being verbally abused by every player on both teams.
Kerry Fraser's way of dealing with this was to basically choose one coach or the other to side with in every game. Fraser would then suffer endless abuse from one coach/bench while clearly favoring the other. But I guess he thought that was better than getting abuse from both.
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